Category Archive for 'The Din'

When you sit through a Physics 101 course, you are taught fundamental laws of motion, particularly Newtownian mechanics. You are then assigned problems that may go something like: you jump naked off of the Freedom Tower, and there is no wind velocity in any direction. How long until impact? And then you go ahead and […]

A good friend (CD) e-mails me some choice pieces from Emerson’s essay on self-reliance. I think these are useful to keep in mind as the whirlwind of identity consumes us these days … “In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great […]

It is good intellectual practice (probably not dinner party practice) to take your ideas until they can go no further. If I had one magic wand to wave, one feature I might consider is that all of our attempts to be liked or at least not appear to be one of the deplorables were seriously […]

How about this? Most of the stone a nation hammers goes toward its tomb only. It buries itself alive. As for the Pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious […]

Continuing in Walden, this brought a sad chuckle: We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough. After all, the […]